With Croydon designated as one of the unhealthiest boroughs in London Foods for Life Nutrition and Health consultancy called for a joint effort to make Croydon a healthier place to live and work. A focus on 5 portions of vegetables per day seemed a good place to start.

People are eating as badly as they were 10 years ago despite the spending of hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money on advertsing campaigns on fruit and vegetables, saturated fat and other health issues, the Government’s food watchdog admitted yesterday.

In a nationwide nutrition survey, the Food Standards Agency found that the majority of people were still eating too many processed foods and sweets and not enough oily fish and fresh fruit and vegetables. Adults ate twice as much sausages as white fish, and boys almost equalled their consumption of salad and other raw vegetables with chocolate. Teenagers ate five times as much white as wholemeal bread.

The survey suggests that the Government has made little headway in reducing the diet-related ill-health, which the Cabinet Office estimated last year costs 70,000 lives and £6billion to the NHS annually.

Richard Watts of Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming said: “After 10 years of largely small, weak or voluntary initiatives, like Change4Life, we have seen little improvement in the nation's diet.

“Where the government has introduced tough rules, such as improving school food, genuine progress has been made but unless we really challenge our 'obeseogenic' culture by doing things like introducing proper protections from junk food marketing, these worrying trends will continue.”

Leading UK Nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston from Foods for Life says "It's a little early to be saying that the Change4Life campaign has failed but there's no doubt government needs to dramatically rethink the issue of holistic preventative health measures to save the NHS from collapsing into a black hole"